In the far future, carnivores have managed to drive the human race off of planet Earth into the stars, leaving their cities behind to be populated by various strange creatures. This short series follows two odd carnivores, Yans and Gans, as they try to find their next meal, with the pair scheming and failing to catch and eat a specific and equally odd creature they come across.
Known in Japan as Yans! Gans!, Meat Or Die is a series of 3D shorts produced by Bonus.co.jp. While they were initially produced for TV in Japan as well as the Spain branch of Canal+, their international run was massively eclipsed by their easy accesibility on the Nintendo 3DS Nintendo Video service.
See here
for the official website, and here for the series YouTube channel.
Meat Or Die provides the following examples:
- After the End: Humans are out in space, but what's left of New York is overgrown with vegetation and bizarre animals everywhere.
- Big Applesauce: The series takes place in the ruins of New York City.
- Bumbling Henchmen Duo: Yans (the tall blue one) and Gans (the short red one). They also double as a Red Oni, Blue Oni and Big Guy, Little Guy duo.
- Consuming Passion: Whenever the duo gets meat-crazed, a heart appears over their target and they go slobbering mad. Combine this with the Japanese slang meaning of "carnivore" and "herbivore" (active and passive roles in a relationship, respectively), and you've got this trope.
- Flower Motifs: The Meats (and herbivorism in general) are associated with a pink four-petal flower.
- Gone Horribly Right: Yans and Gans make a plan to lure out Naomi with flowers before leading her into an oil slick trap so they can eat her while she's down. Naomi falls for it and trips... onto them, as the duo slipped on the oil and couldn't make it out of the way in time.
- Meat Versus Veggies: Carnivores Yans and Gans have harsh color schemes, overly macho and aggressive attitudes, and sharp edges on their character designs. The various herbivores they hunt down are round, decked out in pastels, and are usually minding their own business before Yans and Gans show up. There's also some elements of Mars and Venus Gender Contrast to it, as Yans and Gans are both male while all of the herbivores are female.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Episodes are called "Meats", which are titled after the target of the week.
- Not-So-Harmless Villain: The leads are shown to be incompetent bumblers whenever they attempt to hunt something, but somehow they were enough of a threat that humans had to take to the stars to avoid them.
- Ocular Gushers: In "Helena", Yans cries these when Gans takes his Cranial Eruption back to eat.
- Stylistic Suck: Yanz' Eureka Momentss are depicted as extremely simplistic drawings.
- Sudden Video-Game Moment: Gans' Eureka Moments are depicted as 8-bit minigames.
- Toilet Humor: Several of the episodes use toilet humor a punchline.
- Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: When you consider the backstory and their general bad attitudes, it's tough for one to feel bad for Yans and Gans starving to the point of hallucinations, sticking themselves with spikes, or being shot at by humans with lasers and falling back to Earth in a burning heap.
